Worth a trip to Moon

Thursday 16 July 2009 23:00 BST

Few directors can have made a sci-fi movie as cheaply as Duncan Jones (David Bowie’s son) — and that you can’t accuse it of looking cheap is a compliment to the debut director. It is just a shame the plot doesn’t quite gel by the end.

The excellent Sam Rockwell plays an astronaut who has to spend three years in his antiseptic space capsule on the Moon, occasionally essaying out for a routine drive in a lunar rover. His only companion is Gerty, a nice computer who seems a kind of descendant of Kubrick’s Hal and is voiced by Kevin Spacey.

One day, plagued with headaches and hallucinations, wishing his wife and child would send him another video from Earth, he has an accident in his rover. When Gerty has helped him recover, he finds himself presented with a younger, angrier version of himself (Rockwell again).

What happens then shall remain a secret — but isn’t much upon which to cling as a plot. Even so, Jones, as writer and director, has fashioned a good-looking, claustrophobic piece despite his limited resources. And his idea that our astronaut is there because a way has been found to supply the earth with clean energy from the sun via a lunar mining operation isn’t quite so outré as it might seem — even if we don’t see any miners.